On Tanking

Does a team always have an obligation to play its best players on any given night? At what point does a team decide that playing it’s younger players in order to build experience for the future trumps its need to win the game that evening? What if a team is made up of barely qualified NBA players who probably have no long term future with the team for which they’re playing? The Cavaliers were built that way at the end of the season last year. Is not fielding a team that has any chance of being competitive a violation of sporting ethics?

The NBA has become a place where losing is rewarded. As a team loses its odds of getting a lower draft pick become higher. To prevent teams from losing on purpose to better their draft position, the NBA instituted a lottery. Starting in 1985, the first three picks of the draft were determined randomly, first by drawing envelopes out of a hopper, and then starting in 1990, according to a number of ping pong balls. After 1993, when Orlando had a 41-41 record and still won the lottery, the rules were changed to favor bad teams even more.

The problem with the draft lottery is that it provides incentives to fail. It can be argued that these incentives are are antithetical to the concept of competition, fair play, and trying one’s hardest. The term “tanking” has been coined to describe the process where “competitor deliberately loses without gambling being involved.” Why is tanking so different from point shaving, which is one step better than fixing a game? I imagine that the giant of American baseball, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis would have had something to say about tanking, or even the appearance of tanking.

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball. Of course, I don’t know that any of these men will apply for reinstatement, but if they do, the above are at least a few of the rules that will be enforced. Just keep in mind that, regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.

I suppose that since there is no grift involved against a perspective gambler, tanking is a step above match fixing and point shaving. Furthermore, it can be impossible to tell if a team is merely losing because of circumstance, because of effort, because of substitutions, or because of holding players out of games when they could be playing. David Stern was reportedly livid earlier this year when Gregg Popovich sat Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili against Miami, because “the Spurs did a disservice to the league and our fans.” But little was made of a game in March, when the Phoenix Suns played the Utah Jazz, and sat out Goran Dragic for “rest.” Of course Phoenix lost that game 103-88. Why was that game important? Because Utah, of course, is batting the Lakers for the final playoff spot, and Phoenix receives the Lakers’ first round pick this year, if the Lakers do not make the playoffs. So Phoenix did its part to help Utah keep the Lakers out of the playoffs by sitting arguably its best player, Goran Dragic. Of course, this can’t be proved. It’s a wink wink / nudge nudge situation. And that’s the whole problem with tanking. I doubt that Landis would think too highly of Phoenix’s actions.

A further problem with tanking is that it erodes competitive balance. In theory, every team in the East and West conferences has an equal schedule. But teams that have more “bad” teams at the end of their schedule have an advantage against teams that have those same teams at the beginning of the season, if those teams are trying to lose. Is it even possible to tell if teams are tanking? I have become more sensitive to it in the last few years. We basketball fans have all become more aware of the issue because of current articles like yesterday’s Plain Dealer which illustrated the draft implications of the Cavs recent two day win streak or yesterday’s SB Nation Draft lottery watch subtitled: Magic threatening to outsuck Bobcats. Grantland’s Brett Koremenos explored this idea in Grantland last month with his article titled Solving the Real Problem with the NBA’s Tanking Epidemic. Bill Simmons and Malcom Gladwell discussed the topic in a 2009 series of letters, with Gladwell summing up the tanking problem as well as anyone.

You simply cannot have a system that rewards anyone, ever, for losing. Economists worry about this all the time, when they talk about “moral hazard.” Moral hazard is the idea that if you insure someone against risk, you will make risky behavior more likely. So if you always bail out the banks when they take absurd risks and do stupid things, they are going to keep on taking absurd risks and doing stupid things … If you give me a lottery pick for being an atrocious GM, where’s my incentive not to be an atrocious?

Furthermore, when front offices become incentivized to fail, they have a few different ways of doing it. They could tell the coach to play young players, or to put them in bad positions. The coach could make baffling decision that were in direct violation of common sense if one wanted to win the game. I wrote semi-sarcastically of Scott and Tyler Zeller in loss to Boston a couple weeks ago, “[Zeller] finished 5-6 for 11 points and 9 boards in 24 minutes. In a masterful move Scott left him on the bench for much of the fourth quarter, knowing that his play might turn the game in the Cavs’ favor late.” The problem compounds itself when the players realize what is going on and stop giving maximum effort. If Cavs observers are reading the tea leaves, this moment might have come in an awful loss to Brooklyn a few nights later.

But is this fair? There is an unwritten code in sports: try your hardest. If Byron Scott and the Cavs organization is not trying their hardest, why should the players? Is it even a fair observation? Are we as a society so jaded that we see conspiracies even in our trivial pastimes? Are we simply confusing fatigue, injury, and normal human behavior (i.e. incompetence) for a conspiracy to lose? In examining those factors, I decided to do a quick experiment. My hypothesis was, if tanking has gotten as bad as it seems, then we should be able to see the results of it. I charted a couple things over the course of the last 26 seasons. First, team winning percentage. My hypothesis was that if we’re seeing record tying winning streaks by teams like the Heat, is this partially because of tanking? If so, then the winning percentage of all the non-playoff teams ought to be going down over the last few seasons. The results surprised me.

Remember that the Charlotte Bobcats were added to the league in 2005. Winning percentage of non playoff teams went up that year and the two years after, and then dropped the next three years. The Raptors and the Grizzlies were added in 1995, causing the number to drop in the 1996 and 1997 seasons. This is actually counter-intuitive because as the pool of non playoff teams grows, one would expect an “averaging effect” to push the winning percentage of the losing teams up. The Hornets and the Heat were added in 1988 and the Timberwolves and Magic in 1989. The winning percentage increase after these years indicates this effect. But what is clear, is that the last three seasons have seen slightly more competitive non playoff teams than the previous three seasons. This season is certainly no outlier when it comes to non-playoff team winning percentage.

But winning percentage is certainly not the best barometer of how good a team is. There’s a lot of noise in it. Many NBA statisticians have long preferred point differential as a barometer of team quality. Basketball-reference has a normalized stat called Simple Rating System SRS which takes into account point differential and strength of schedule to come up with a number that is slightly better than point differential as a barometer. This normalizes the number a bit giving us the ability to compare teams in the two different conferences.

As can be seen, SRS took a big jump in 1998 and 1999 , and then dropped quickly. The 2008 season was particularly bad for SRS, two years after the the Bobcats joined the league. But once again, the current season is a slight uptick, and the last few seasons don’t seem like statistical outliers at all. But if there is tanking going on in the NBA, it was at its worst in 1988, 1994, and 2008, and then has been around the same level since, on average. Or there were just a lot of really bad teams those years.

There are certainly a lot of limits to this analysis. This averages the best and worst teams that didn’t make the playoffs into one group. An analysis that breaks the non playoff teams into tiers and analyzes those tiers over time would be a more precise way to measure if tanking is going on. Also, looking at winning percentages post all-star break would be an interesting method as well. We could even start looking at post all star break injuries and correlating them to average games missed, and seeing if “tanking” teams are holding their players out too long. I hope to be able to break this down a little more in the future. And I know there are mathematical implications that come from having a finite number of available wins and losses in a season that I am not nearly bright enough to have contemplated yet. But what we have shown is that this season is no worse than the last few, and if tanking is going on, it can’t be detected this easily, or it is much more ingrained in NBA culture than we’d like to suspect.

I would like to see the league take steps to eliminate tanking. I’d like them to redistribute the lottery percentages a little more evenly. The league overreacted to the Magic in 1994. I also proposed a system in the past that would disallow a team getting the first pick to get it the next year. A team that picked in the top three two years in a row would not be able to get there a third. Similarly, if a team picked in the top give for three years in a row, I’d like to see the best pick they could get the following year to be a number six. A team that has been in the lottery four years in a row ought not be able to get a pick higher than ten, and a team that has been in the lottery five years in a row ought to have to sit at the end of the lottery for a year. Of course this is just a framework, and these numbers can be tweaked, but you get the idea. Don’t over-reward teams for losing.

This season and the Cavs don’t seem any worse than the last few when it comes to tanking. I don’t like to think that people pick and choose when it is most advantageous to play hard, or when losing might be OK. And as much as any Cavs fan, the last few seasons have worn on me. It is a difficult situation to be in when the choices for explaining ten game losing streaks are incompetence, laziness, injuries that may or may not be real, or losing on purpose. As painful as the Cavs might seem in moments like the Brooklyn loss, those moments are uplifted by jubilant victories over teams like the Clippers, Oklahoma City, Chicago, and Boston. I hope very soon that I won’t even have to ponder the question of tanking at all. Such is the hope of fandom, especially in Cleveland. There’s always next year — well, unless the Cavs are in a playoff race against a team with a lot of tankers on its schedule.

20 Responses to “On Tanking”

Great stuff Nate. No real conclusions here, but interesting concepts to throw out there. I like penalizing repeated bad teams – it’ll force more competition and less outright tanking.

One of the reasons I’m so adamant in my dislike for the lottery is that it’s incredibly hard to predict how young guys will turn out. Unless there’s a flat out, can’t miss prospect like Anthony Davis, Lebron, or Greg Oden (whoops?!) it doesn’t really make sense to screw with team chemistry and the efforts of young guys.

To put this into perspective, at least one of the group of Anthony Davis, Beal, MKG, and Dion will probably turn out to be a huge bust. Just based purely on the law of averages. Many GMs see their talent levels interchangeably – they’re all high ceiling, high character(ish) guys. Tanking to get Beal vs Dion might mean you get the “better” prospect, but it doesn’t ensure you made the right choice in the long run.

Great work. I think the answer though is that we just live with it. The Grantland article has writers trying to think like economists (though why anyone asks Gladwell for any thoughts on economics is beyond me). But if you have an actual economist look at the entirety of the NBA landscape, he’ll find countless examples where even basic economic concepts just don’t apply. And that’s because the NBA (and other sports leagues) are designed to NOT be like a (mostly) free market economy.

In successful free markets, the economy works when better, smarter, more efficient companies force the worse, dumber, and wasteful ones out of the market. There’s nothing like this in the NBA. Sure, the better franchises will still succeed, but the NBA can’t eliminate the bad ones. For the NBA to succeed as a whole, places like Cleveland Charlotte have to be able to add to the total pie. Part of what makes the NBA work is that Cleveland can get a Kyrie Irving, and reignite the fanbase to spend money on what previously was a bad team (even if it still is a bad team).

I’m just not sure how you can end tanking. Sure, you can try to fine teams that look like they are giving a sub-par effort or sitting perfectly healthy players, but there’s a lot gray area here, and it will be extremely tough to enforce. How you do you know if 6th man X’s bruised knee is bad enough that he can’t play, and if him not playing is important enough that it will be a serious detriment on the team’s ability to win? You can try to force teams to spend more, which they actually did in the last CBA, but that forces teams to throw good money after bad money. Is that $5 million on a key bench guy really worth going from 30 to 32 wins?

Tanking is a perfectly acceptable strategy for an NBA franchise and the league should absolutely not interfere with it. Regardless of the results or repercussions , if a team feels that tanking is their best option to put together a championship caliber team, they are entitled (and rightfully so) to pursue it.

Tanking results from small market, cold-weather teams that are forced to find ways to complete with other markets that have advantages in free agency in terms of putting together a quality roster. The examples are numerous, there’s no point in listing them.

The current FA system allows large market, warm-weather teams to thrive, despite complete ineptitude by the GMs. Look at the draft picks by NY and LA for the past decade. It’s comically bad. By rights, if you consistently miss on your picks, the team should be bad. However, since NY and LA continually get the best players from other teams, it doesn’t matter. That’s a much bigger problem than tanking.

If you want to eliminate tanking, then the NBA has to have a hard cap. Not a soft cap & luxury tax, a hard cap. Perhaps even a franchise tag. It’s ridiculous to allow NY & LA to loot other teams rosters, while telling Orlando, Cleveland, and New Orleans “Too bad. Now go out and play. Oh yeah, quit eye-balling that #1 pick.”

A hard cap is the only solution that’s fair. It forces teams to be wise with draft picks. It forces stars to take a huge cut in salary to go play with other stars. Put a hard cap in place, tanking will resolve itself.

Nice article. I wouldn’t be against restrictions in the lottery, but I’m still in favor of the lottery. It’s easy to blame teams for tanking, but it’s seriously the only salvation for a lot of them. We’re in the buddy ball era. We’re in the collusion era. Tanking is a trickle down problem. There is no level playing field in the NBA. I’d want a hard cap and if not a franchise tag before a massive overhaul to the lottery. The new Chernobyl luxury tax is only going to make it impossible for most small market teams to hold their teams together if they do have success.

The new CBA actually gave the big market teams a leg up. The new tax made OKC have to trade away Harden. The Grizzlies handed the Cavs a future lottery pick (yay!) to take two members of their rotation off their books. The Knicks, Lakers and Nets just kept adding payroll because their massive local TV deals off set the cost.

I’m down with your proposed rules of not being able to win the lottery two years in a row or be in the top three more than twice in a three year period. Perhaps giving lottery percentages in tiers would help also. The bottom four teams have an equal odds of course being the highest. The second tier is the next four. Then the next six. There would still be tanking but it would reduce the large scale tanking. I don’t think the 14th team in the league should have a realistic shot at winning the lottery. Fringe playoff teams are often just as mismanaged as the bottom dwellers. The Bucks are in perpetual suspended animation. Just good enough to get swept this year by Miami. Next year they’ll probably lose Jennings and be the 10th worst team in the league and be stuck salary wise. Then they’ll basically have to tread water for a few more years of mediocrity or blow it up.

The entire machine is broken. Not just the lotto.

The entire system is broken and has been for years. Over expansion doesn’t get it’s just due for the problems with the league. In an ideal world every team would have it’s own marketable star for it’s franchise. It’s just not a reality. The demand for star players has never been higher and unless your franchise is in a macro city or near a beach you aren’t getting one without the lottery. Two less teams would make a world of difference. I’m not saying that Charlotte shouldn’t have an NBA team. The Hornets never should have left. Shinn was a terrible owner. He destroyed what was one of the best NBA markets. I was all for the NBA contracting the Hornets and Kings after the NBA had to buy the Hornets from Shinn.

“We’re in the buddy ball era. We’re in the collusion era. Tanking is a trickle down problem. There is no level playing field in the NBA. I’d want a hard cap and if not a franchise tag before a massive overhaul to the lottery.”

Oh, I don’t ever mind anyone being critical, Cody, as long as it’s fair and reasoned. And anyway, I didn’t take your points as that anyway, just augmentation/counterpoint.

Cory, I definitely noticed the effects of expansion and wish I’d mentioned it more. Expansion in the NBA in the last 25 years has pushed the number of teams that don’t make the playoffs from 7 to 14. That’s an enormous increase. There’s something wrong with the league when almost half the teams are playing for nothing or sitting for the last 4 months of the year (February-June). If the NBA gets it’s way and expands to Europe and/or Asia, it will get even worse. There’s just no incentive other than ticket sales to provide a positive product to one’s fans. Simmons and others have proposed adding more tournaments and trophies, and maybe that’s what’s needed. I can’t imagine having been a Sacramento fan for the last three years.

I don’t understand why this is such a big issue in the NBA but no one talks about it in the NFL. Is it because 1 player can have a bigger impact in the NBA? … well I guess I just answered my own question, sorry.

Hard cap is really the only way I see to resolve the issue, as many have stated. The way the CBA is now it’s pretty much setup so that the whole league landscape is going to change every 3 years or so. Think about it, all the talk about how Miami is going to have to disband the “Big-3″ because of the repeater luxury tax penalties … just in time for the Lakers to be loaded with cap space (assuming no Howard/Kobe) … ok, so then LA has a super team for 3 years before having to blow it up probably just in time for Miami (or the like) to be flush with cap space again. It’s going to be a never ending cycle.

A hard cap would make it so the Miami’s of the world wouldn’t be able to go out and sign Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis, etc… every year just because they are old, made their money, and don’t mind playing for small contracts (that can fit into exceptions) just to have a shot to win a title. Miami/Lakers/Knicks should absolutely NOT be linked to every possible free agent out there. Kobe wants another ring? He’s made more money than he could ever spend, what stops him from taking minimum deal to come off the Heat bench (other than his ego of course)? Small additional penalty for them, big rewards for everyone else involved.

In theory, it COULD happen anywhere. I guess we will see if the Cavs don’t spend their money this offseason and DO end up having enough for 2 max guys before having to extend Kyrie. If Lebron and Kevin Love come here (just an example don’t get off topic), do people in Cleveland still have a problem with what the Heat did? On the flipside if they save all that money and Lebron and Love go to the Lakers, then we’re back to the “Small markets don’t have a chance” argument.

Other than a hard cap, the only other solution is contraction… and as a Cleveland fan just the mention of contraction makes me nervous.

I don’t think tanking is really what’s wrong with the league though. I think the bigger issue is the lack of parity.

Teams tank because they’re hoping for a saviour because it’s impossible to compete against teams with superstars.

I think the league would be so much better if a handful of franchises were eliminated altogether. Talent is stretched too thin, and it makes it easier for the select superstars to completeley dominate games.

Alternatively, something more plausible which I think would be really great for the game, would be a meaningful franchise tag. Let’s say after a player finishes three seasons for a team, he would be eligible for a franchise contract. That contract would only count against the salary cap as a typical max contract, but the actual deal could be limitless. Superstars could get closer to their actual worth and this would prevent the stacked teams like Miami from happening. Stars would have to really hate the team they were on to pass on signing a huge contract. In turn they would be more likely to sign in smaller markets during free agency if teams like LA, NY, etc already had someone signed to a franchise contract.

My proposal: The 5 teams with the 5 worst records each have a 20% chance at the #1 or #5 pick. You could go on to do the same with 6-10, 11-15 but I don’t think you would really have to or need to in those cases. That is what I would like to seen happen. It doesn’t reward any team for sucking more than the other except maybe teams 5-6. You could even make it the bottom 6 teams, which would, in theory, allow a 50% chance for for the east and west to garner the first pick. That woud read something like, Charlotte, Orlando, Phoenix, Cleveland, Detroit, Sacremento for the #1.

Also EtereoX, there are only a handful of games where teams tank (~2-6 as oposed to ~20-40), teams play against their rivals a higher percent of the time so they feel amped to play hard, there is more player turnover and a higher Uncertain Future to Certain Future ratio in the NFL, so more players can’t afford to take a game easy, and yes, one player doesn’t make as big of an impact.

Cody, I really liked your response though. This isn’t free market economics, this is a mutual band of owners trying to maximize profits collectively with no direct competition. The best way to do that is to develop a nation wide fan base, which is more easily done if you have at least semi relevant teams all over with the downtrodden teams having reason to hope, instead of only having people in NY or Cali watch sports. The Lottery is fine, its helping us, I’m sorry you have to watch a couple months of crappy basketball, but without the lottery and with everything else the same, we’d just be watching crappy basketball every year of our lives.

-Sitting Tyler Zeller (Dragic on the other hand…) is about the weakest evidence for tanking I can think of. Sorry, Nate. I don’t care if he was 20 for 20 and they were all on 3s. Sitting a perfectly healthy Kyrie Irving is another story entirely. Watching last night’s game (which was incredible): little Spike Albrecht was about to put an end to the whole debate about divine intervention – and then he laid an egg in the second half (the debate rages on!). Should he or shouldn’t he have been on the court as much as he was in the 2nd half? Remember Mo Speights 10/10 first half? He followed it up 0-4 in the second half with a bunch of turnovers.

-Byron Scott has nothing to gain by losing right now. Most of the players have nothing to gain by losing. If the FO is pulling strings behind the scenes to purposely lose, I’d be shocked. Having the #15 pick vs no pick is a MUCH greater incentive to casually sit Dragic than the Cavs incentives to increase their lottery odds by a few percentage points.

-A better “proof” of tanking is if the expected # of wins based on point differential or SRS or whatever MINUS the ACTUAL wins (since actual Ws are the only input to the lottery odds) has grown larger since the inclusion of the lottery. No team wants to ‘be bad’ at any time – they may want to ‘lose games’ to improve their draft odds. So if in the 80s you looked at expected wins and subtracted actual wins and they averaged to ~0 but today you look at expected wins minus subtracted wins and the number is larger than zero (say 3-6 games) then you might be able to empirically show that lottery teams are sabotaging Ws.

-I still haven’t replaced my dropped jaw from the San Antonio thing. Greg Popovich has earned the right to do whatever he darn well pleases. He is a winner of the highest order. He is ahead of the curve and understands how little regular season games mean in the grand scheme (2009 Cavaliers anyone?). Being healthy and hot at the right time is the name of this game. There is enough evidence that playing 4 games in 5 nights (because of TV ratings) is detrimental to health of these players. That organization has done almost everything right – and to punish them for that was outrageous. Side note: the heat rested their stars against the spurs a few weeks back and no one made a peep.

-Cody – you forgot the most comically bad stretch of drafting of the LeBron era….the MIAMI HEAT!

The Heat also wasted two years of Wade’s prime to prepare for Summer of Collusion 2010. Not that they knew all along that Bosh and Lebron would be leaving or anything…

I don’t really think the Cavs tanked per se this year with the exception to the quality of the bench before the Memphis deal. I totally agreed that Grant should have maintained his flexibility for this summer and 2014 rather than 2012 because he still didn’t really know what he had with Thompson, Waiters or Zeller yet. We have a better idea now and will more so next offseason. It seems from a few articles back that the general consensus of the commenters and bloggers was that the Cavs could have won 30-33 games if they would have stayed healthy this season. They’ll probably end up around 25 or 26 wins. That’s not a colossal difference when your top three players have missed extended time on this inexperienced of a team.

Every situation is different. We all try to use examples but none of them really apply. Luck factors in a lot to the successful teams. If the Spurs weren’t decimated by injuries in 1996/97, they wouldn’t be the Spurs we know today. If they would have landed the 2nd pick in the 1997 draft they wouldn’t be the same Spurs today. Pop could have been fired five years in along with Buford. The Cavs aren’t the Thunder. They won’t become the Kings either. Also I’d take Gilbert over Bennet and the broke ass Maloofs any day.

Tom makes a very good point on how these back to back games have been detrimental on team injuries. There should be more attention focused on it because is startling. RIght now in NBA injuries Hawks, Cavs, Kinicks lead with 6 players out. CUrrently there is apprx 80 that’s right 80 players out throughout the NBA. THis year by far has been less enjoyable to watch because many teams are plagued with injuries. There is absolutely evidence to support the back to backs especially 5 in a row have contributed to this. Visit http://www.cbssports.com/nba/injuries It is astonishing to see the lengthy list. Btw I have no idea why Harangody is listed so Cavs injuries would be 5. I don’t know what the hell people expect Scott to do with this many out.

The Lineup: (Click for Author’s Archive)

Nate Smith is an Associate Editor. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, and moved to NE Ohio in 2000. He adopted the Cavs in 2003 and graduated from Kent State in 2009 with a BA in English. He can be contacted at oldseaminer@gmail.com or @oldseaminer on Twitter.

Tom Pestak is an Associate Editor. He's from the west side of Cleveland and lives and (mostly) dies by the success and (mostly) failures of his beloved teams. You can watch his fanaticism during Cavs games @tompestak.

Robert Attenweiler is a Staff Writer. Originally from OH, he's long made his home in NYC where he writes plays and screenplays (www.disgracedproductions.com) some of which end up being about Ohio, basketball or both. He has also written for The Classical and the blog Raising the Cadavalier. You can contact him at rattenweiler@gmail.com or @cadavalier.

Benjamin Werth is a Staff Writer. He was born in Cleveland and raised in Mentor, OH. He now lives in Germany where he is an opera singer and actor. He can be reached at blfwerth@gmail.com.

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